Notes for My Body Double by Paul Guest. Bison Books, $17.95.

By Jesse R. Bishop

      Paul Guest’s second book of poetry, Notes for My Body Double, is full of the kinds of poems that appeal to poets, students, and lay-readers. The poems are tightly crafted, but full of references and imagery that belie the technical and emotional weight they carry. They are the kinds of poems that one might copy and tack up on bulletin boards in the office, tape to the bar at the local pub, or perhaps one is just as likely to buy copies of the book and give them to friends and enemies alike. It could be why Rodney Jones referred to Guest as “one of the most brilliant poets in America” in a blurb for Guest’s first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World. Guest uses high-art and low-art references and imagery to balance the development of the book’s ultimate doppelganger, love.

      Notes for My Body Double writes itself into and onto the world in ways that oscillate gently through the broad spectrums of the psyche, of popular culture, and of the physical world in an effort to define the “I” of the poems and that speaker’s doppelganger.  As the speaker ponders in the opening poem, “Between Buck Owens and Vivaldi what’s left/ to listen to but the stars” (“Nothing” 1-2), so too must the reader wonder what’s left? What’s left after low-art and high-art? What’s left after the body meets the world? What’s left when so much has been said and done? Guest uses celluloid icons Godzilla and Bugs Bunny to balance the weight of poems that deal with universal loss through popular media and culture. At the same time, he uses Donald Duck to grieve for lost opportunity: “Is it too late to say what I want?”  While at times a book of things (mythic lizards, cartoon carrot-eaters, broken necks, missed chances, and warm bodies), the body double that lives in each poem is on occasion the poet’s shadow; other times it is you or I, readers drawn into the quiet motion of the work; and still the body double is always, sometimes imperceptibly yet aptly love.

      Guest writes in “Nothing,” “That nothing has ever been/ truly nothing is why I believe,/ even still in love” (8-9). Perhaps this belief allows the speaker to consider the possibility that anything can exist, even something as old, tried, and perhaps tired as love in poetry. It is where this love is found that seems most remarkable in the collection. Love seems to live somewhere between Godzilla (“Questions for Godzilla”) and Bugs Bunny as Napoleon (“Elba”). In these figures, the Technicolor colossus and aping cartoon, we find the repositories of love for the self, that child within. Still, the poems are grown up in the ways that matter most. The book’s occasionally frenetic pacing is “imperceptibly slowed” (“Seduction with Entropy” 19) in the right moments, asking the reader to hold on to the minutia.

      The poem “Water,” the simple act of touch makes manifest the speaker’s desire for something as simple as fingers, yet something so important. Guest writes:

            How I wanted to graze with my hand

            the armored hides of sturgeons

            aslosh in the shallow tanks

            I did not tell you […]

                        I forgot

            my place in the story I idly told you,

      as we rose in the elevator,

      as your hands found in my neck a knot

      your fingers could untie

      with ease. Love, you know

      that language has failed me

      early with you […]” (Water 1-17)

The incapability of the speaker to feel, literally, the world makes him dependent upon the touch of another upon his body, or so he leads us to think. In actuality, Guest slows the poem down by varying the line lengths by a few syllables, alternating lines to mimic breathing, so that by the end, the speaker’s touch becomes real through the recounting of the scene:

            But know: when we stood on one side

            of thick glass to watch

            a world of water ignore our entire lives,

            I kissed your fingers

            and each one in that light was blue. (21-25)

Here, as the poem slows to the ebb and flow of breaths and words, of touch and desire, the body speaks or writes itself into action, even if the action is imagined. Perhaps that is the greatest enactment of love in the book: the imagination of desires made real.

            The imagination becomes an important force in the sharing of the speaker’s various loves, the bodily and the spiritual. In “Elba,” the speaker’s point of reference moves quickly and slyly from childhood cartoons and the way imagination works to perceptions of bodily beauty. When the speaker draws parallels between his own broken body and that of Napoleon, Elba (to whom he speaks) becomes repulsed. Faced with the description of his affliction he notes, “I can see her ardor marry grief/ and I want to save her/ from my life” (19-21). Here lives a speaker who wants to protect the world from the inscription of the pity of others onto his own body. The poem’s name implies the isolation of the speaker in his emotionally protective yet physically (and perhaps psychologically) vulnerable state. The island prison here is one that becomes self-imposed as the speaker negotiates how much he is willing to allow his body to write itself on the world. To share this story is to trap the audience in the broken body, even if for the briefest moment. To simply gaze upon the speaker’s disability is not to acknowledge it, but to see through it and make it invisible. But once he speaks his story to Elba, he has made himself and his body real for her in a way that is tough to comprehend. However, the speaker learns this lesson at the cost of his own ego, realizing how little people really want to know, how little they really want to interact, and finally how little they actually love.

      The vivacity and youthful exuberance of the poems in this book are all tempered by a kind of perception that comes with life experiences of which he writes. In “The Invisible Man Looks into a Mirror,” the speaker offers the following: “Maybe you wake up knotted in your bedclothes/ and what you thought your life was, it isn’t” (1-2). This is a poem of things and those things correspond—more often than not—to the ache of love.

            A liftetime peels away like a wet bandage. 

            Your first true kiss is now vapor. Ditto, the first

            divorce. The first bone you broke.

            Your last bicycle ride. Your first ambulance. (4-7) 

Like a wet bandage, there is always some residue left from life’s injuries, whether they are to the neck or to the heart. For the speaker in Guest’s poems, the body is broken but not shattered, everything still connected. But much like his memories, the speaker’s world seems connected to his body as well, so that anything might become an extension of the I, a doppelganger. The smooth motion of the language of the book more than compensates for the sometimes jerky subject matter, the oscillation between the world and the body.

JESSE BISHOP lives in Carrollton, Georgia, with his wife and daughter. He earned a master's degree from the University of West Georgia, for his collection of poems, A Hand of Figs.
His work has appeared in Pebble Lake Review and Southern Hum, among other places. He teaches for Georgia Highlands College.